Apple Robbed the Mob's Bank | Hacker News Reader

Apple Robbed the Mob's Bank

mobiledevmemo.com

18 pointskjhughes6 comments

> To a true privacy zealot — someone for whom any ads targeting is an ethical disaster — would this new privacy configuration of “First Party = Good, Third Party = Bad” be acceptable?

Is anyone truly this zealous? I don't care if Amazon wants to advertise power tools to me because they've observed that I often search for powertools on amazon.com. On the contrary, that's precisely the ad targeting that I appreciate and would encourage.

I don't understand the hand-wringing around Apple using App Store purchases to inform drive App Store advertising. I expect companies to do this, and would arguably be disappointed if they didn't.

Google can and should use my search history to inform my search results. Instagram can and should use my posting history and follows to inform the advertisements I see in my home feed.

What is concerning is when purchases I make in some random third party app are used to inform advertisements I see on Facebook. This is surprising and invasive.

I expect my baker to offer me cheesecakes if he has observed that I often buy cheesecake from him. I would be disturbed if he started offering me Viagra, because someone he paid to track my purchases told him I often buy it.

We are just supposed to trust Apple. It's a big problem with the world we've created, we have these unaccountable (to the public) private entities. Their interests are not our interests. We know they share data with the US government, since the PRISM revelations. There's nothing that makes me think that has stopped.

Apple's "differential privacy" seems to be FLOC by another name.

FLOC and differential privacy are very different. They may seem to overlap because they both detect behavior on device, and with some measure of anonymity transmit some kind of derived data off device, but their purposes are entirely different, as is the link of the derived data back to your specific device.

FLOC is meant to "anonymously" quantize you into one of several thousand peer groups (based on sites visited,) so that google can get an essence of who YOU are, and share it with every site you visit. The information gleaned follows you, and sites respond to your specific behavior profile group.

Differential Privacy is more like an anonymous survey every device answers with plausible deniability, so that Apple can get general information about the user base as a whole, completely not attributable to you or linked back to you in any way. The information gleaned does not follow you, and can never be used to address you specifically.

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